CPA - The Guardian

White Australia’s convict background, the rebel attitudes of its many Irish and Scottish immigrants and the Eureka Stockade experience very early led to the growth of militant sentiment among workers. This was particularly evident among the itinerant rural workers who manned the shearing sheds in the country’s most important and valuable primary industry – wool production.

The Shearers’ Union was formed in 1886 and fierce struggles were waged for union recognition and rights in the sheds. Unions at the time were almost entirely craft based. However, the Australian economy was largely agricultural. Primary industry (not counting mining) accounted for 80 percent of the value of production at least until 1910.

The dearth of industry, and the apparent ready availability of land encouraged the growth of a small-holder mentality among workers. This in turn fostered the growth of reformist illusions rather than revolutionary politics. There were numerous strikes and industrial disputes, but mainly around questions of conditions and union recognition.

When the great shearers’ strike of 1891 was defeated, reformism led many union leaders to conclude that the only way forward was for the union movement to have its own representatives in parliament. Labor parties, established to elect “union candidates”, were formed in the various colonies beginning in 1891.

The Communist Party of Australia's Guardian covers one of the 20th Century's darkest moments in its 30 June, 1950, edition.

Labor parties

By 1900, strong Labor parties had developed in NSW and Queensland. (The world’s first social democratic (ie Labor) government actually took office in Queensland in 1899, lasting seven days.) A socialist political party, the Social Democratic Vanguard, was established (also in Queensland) as early as 1901. It soon disappeared again.

Between then and the First World War, the union movement in Australia fought many class battles, but always from within the confines of the capitalist system. The prevailing ideology was that of the bourgeoisie (and its cousin, the ideology of the petty bourgeoisie). This was partly the consequence of the lack of industry, and hence the absence of a significant proletariat.

The labour movement in this pre-WW1 period consisted of the unions (mainly craft-based as already noted), the ALP (wedded to reformism), two main socialist parties and the Anarchist-influenced IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) or Wobblies (whose left-sectarianism manifested itself in consistently over-estimating the revolutionary potential of the union movement, viewing unions not as a valuable support and ally of the revolutionary forces but as in fact the leaders of the revolutionary struggle). The two socialist parties referred to were the Victorian Socialist Party and (in NSW) the Australian Socialist Party.

Both these parties were utopian socialists: they believed that the capitalist system would one day collapse under the weight of its own rottenness and, in some undefined way, the workers would then take over.

Scientific socialism was not much in evidence. Although Marx and Engels had written the Manifesto of the Communist Party back in 1848, it did not appear in an Australian edition until 1920. (Not that it was totally unknown, just that copies were hardly plentiful.)

In 1915, under the stimulus of WW1, BHP began the production of steel in Australia and the country’s modern industrial working class began to develop, but it did so under the existing influence of reformism. For its part, the Australian government was an enthusiastic participant in the imperialist war, promptly seizing German New Guinea and hanging on to it as a colony.

Amid the carnage of the Great War, many in Australia saw the 1916 Easter Uprising in Ireland as heralding a general revolt against tyranny.

That same year, the Australian people voted “no” in a referendum seeking to introduce conscription for the War. Two more referenda on the same topic would also be reject conscription before the War’s end.

Russian Revolution

The following year, in November 1917, Lenin led the Bolsheviks in overthrowing the bourgeois government of Russia and withdrawing the country from the war. The Bolsheviks proclaimed an end to the system of exploiting workers for private profit. They declared their intention to replace capitalism with a socialist society.

The Russian Revolution had a profound effect on the Australian working class movement. Many workers thought the long-talked of day when the capitalist system would spontaneously collapse had finally arrived. A number of Labor Councils ran up the Red flag. Trade union journals and newspapers welcomed the Russian Revolution with rapt, almost extravagant joy.

Over the course of the next couple of years, as the new revolutionary state fought off capitalist military intervention (including by Australian armed forces) and survived all the efforts of imperialism to “strangle it in its crib”, the existing socialist sects in Australia came together to form a Leninist party here.

They rejected the assortment of petty bourgeois “socialist” theories current at the time – from the French Rousseauvian socialism to the Fabian socialism favoured by George Bernard Shaw – and plumped instead for the Scientific Socialism that had carried out the Socialist Revolution in Russia. They became adherents of what would soon be known as Marxism-Leninism.

Formation of the CPA

On October 30, 1920, at a meeting in the Trades Hall in Sydney, they set up the Communist Party of Australia.

Immediately after the inaugural conference, the new party split, the Australian Socialist Party (ASP) withdrawing. Writing a few years later, the CPA’s revered General Secretary, JB Miles (known affectionately to all comrades as “the old man”), said the split was caused by “methods of intrigue” brought in to the new party from “the ALP and trade union practice” compounded by the subjective factor: the leaders of the ASP feared that they would be “submerged”.

Also from early on, a struggle had to be waged in the new Communist Party against left-sectarianism in the form of anarcho-syndicalism exemplified by the IWW. The Wobblies were for a time actually allowed to have their own faction within the party and even to publish their own newspaper within the CPA, but this situation could not last.

Eventually, the struggle for unity was successful and the syndicalists were defeated. However, that was not the end of anarcho-syndicalism in the CPA. Like all deviations from Marxism-Leninism, whether of the “left” or right variety, it is a manifestation and reflection of the class struggle, and hence is fated to recur.

In the 1920s, leftism again manifested itself, overstating the pace of revolutionary change and raising unreal expectations on the part of some comrades. A related rightist error held out the prospect that capitalism was imminently going to “collapse”.

Its failure to do so, and the slow pace of the growth of the Party, led to demoralisation within sections of the CPA. Some declared that the Party’s formation had been “premature”. Some of those who had been recruited from the ALP went back there.

A right-opportunist group led by G Barrachi called for the party’s liquidation. The ruling class, on the other hand, took a different view of the Party’s prospects: in 1926 they tried to ban it.

CP banned

That attempted banning was not finally defeated in the courts until 1932. A scant eight years later the ruling class tried again, this time via the anti-Communist, pro-Nazi, pro-appeasement Robert Menzies banning the Party on June 15, 1940 under laws intended to prevent the spread of Fascism.

(By the time the ban was eventually lifted by the Curtin Labor government, the Soviet Union and its Red Army was being viewed as the saviour of the freedom-loving nations of the world, and the Communist Party had more members than when it was banned.)

However, I digress: back to the 1920s and the attempt to liquidate the Party. JB Miles and Lance Sharkey appealed to the Communist International (known by its Russian abbreviation, the Comintern) for help in the inner party struggle with the liquidators.

Strengthened by the support of the Comintern, the Miles group was able to defeat the liquidators at the 1929 congress. JB Miles became General Secretary and the Party embarked on a vigorous program of industrial organising (just in time for the Great Depression). Within 12 months the Party’s membership grew fourfold.

Left & right deviations

Inevitably, left and right deviations reappeared at different times over the next 30 years, but became prominent again in 1956 when Nikita Krushchev launched an attack on the historical role of JV Stalin, as a key part of an inner-party struggle Krushchev was waging within the CPSU.

The CPA was rocked by Krushchev’s allegations and rushed to distance itself from any hint of the “cult of Stalin’s personality”. The Communist Party of China rejected the accusations against Stalin, denouncing Krushschev for “revisionism”.

In Australia, right-opportunists in the CPA welcomed Krushchev’s attack and left-sectarians were dismayed, and the remainder were disturbed and disappointed. One group, led by Ted Hill, split from the Party and set up their own party, aligning themselves with Mao and the Communist Party of China.

Stalin’s name became a dirty word in the CPA, and it would be many years before a sober, rational and all-sided appraisal of Stalin and his role in history could be made. Meanwhile, opportunism and sectarianism once again came to the fore with the advent in the late 1960s of the Aarons leadership of the Party.

The Aarons brothers had been sent to China for their political education and while there became heavily influenced by Mao’s petty-bourgeois views. The Comintern and the Soviet comrades had recommended that the Communist Party of China rely on developing the working class in China. Mao rightly saw that the peasantry was a much more powerful force for revolution in China at that time, but he failed to see the ideological weaknesses in the peasantry.

Liquidationist parth

With Mao downplaying the leading role of the working class so completely, the new Aarons leadership sought to change the direction of the CPA. They closed down the Party’s industrial branches, which were its strength within the working class, and urged the study of works such as The Wretched of the Earth by the Pan-Africanist Frantz Fanon, works which promoted the lumpen proletariat, the unemployed and slum dwellers as more likely contenders than the working class to be the leading revolutionary class.

The Aarons leadership chased after each new manifestation of “revolutionary struggle”, opportunistically investing each new movement with a revolutionary significance it did not deserve and could not sustain.

It included such events as the student unrest in Paris in 1968. They were so enraptured by the “Prague Spring” of the same year that the CPA actually demonstrated on the steps of the GPO in support of the counter-revolution in Czechoslovakia.

This outrageous course of action raised many hackles within the Party. However, those who objected to such policies were sidelined or even forced out. The Aarons leadership went on its way, overseeing in fact the demise of the Party.

Eventually, when it was clear that the CPA’s present course could lead only to liquidation, the Marxist-Leninists in the Party were faced with a choice: they could stay in the party and try, however futilely, to fight for a better line or they could leave and set up a new party.

Veteran Communist Alf Watt and a few around him chose to stay and fight from within. He published a monthly newspaper, The Australian Socialist, for a while, but it was a very unequal struggle.

Formation of the CPA

The majority chose to join a new party, the Socialist Party of Australia, which was established by several distinct groups of CPA members at a congress in the Sydney Trades Hall on the October long weekend in 1972. Peter Symon became the General Secretary of the new Marxist-Leninist party,

At the 2008 Sydney District Conference, the last that Peter Symon attended, the long-time General Secretary of the SPA and then the CPA, in the context of warning the Conference of the dangers inherent in splitting the Party, stated that, on reflection, he now felt that even the split that created the SPA had been “a mistake”.

Given the aggressive internal policies of the Aarons leadership it is hard to see what could have been done differently, but perhaps, if more Comrades had chosen to stick it out, the outcome of the congress that voted to liquidate what was left of the CPA might indeed have been different.

That Party members should stay in and fight from within was certainly my father’s view, although I personally saw no practical alternative to establishing the SPA. Alf Watt eventually gave up the attempt to “struggle from within” and he too joined the SPA.

Maintaining the struggle in 2009.

As I said before, “left” and right deviations from Marxism-Leninism are an organic outcome of the class struggle and are part of the fight-back of bourgeois and petty bourgeois ideology.

Some years ago, Peter Symon wrote a booklet, Patterns of Struggle, in which he demonstrated that historically the Party’s ideological line had tended to go from left sectarian to right opportunist and back again.

We must be aware of these deviations and be able to recognise them whenever and wherever they raise their heads again.

Next article – Iraq elections will shape post-occupation direction

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